"In the early thirties Trotsky also spoke of ‘Bonapartism’ in the Stalinist regime. In 1935, however, he observed that in the French Revolution Thermidor had come first and Napoleon afterwards; the order should be the same in Russia, and, as there was already a Bonaparte, Thermidor must have come and gone. In an article entitled ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor, and Bonapartism’ he amended his theory somewhat."
I expect it's Trotsky's blindness to his own similarities to Stalin and various reactionaries, plus his blind clinging to Lenin, that blinds him as well to the fact that Lenin was both his own Robespierre (given how he seized power, prosecuted the Civil War, and built his own murderous secret police) and his own Thermidorian reaction (NEP , the nationalities, etc.) and his own Directoire. Stalin was a decent analogue for Napoleon in the sense that he squeezed out the other members of Le Directoire in the end, but Trotsky was really the one for world conquest and constant expansion. (He certainly had the knack for it, given his butcherous but successful performance during the Civil War.) Stalin, monster that he was, was simply doing the heavy lifting of stabilizing the state, since constant revolution is not a viable path for a functioning or even barely functioning state.
"Trotsky, as a true doctrinaire, was insensitive to everything that was happening around him. Of course he followed events closely and commented on them, and did his best to obtain accurate information about the Soviet Union and world politics. But the essence of a doctrinaire is not that he does not read newspapers or collect facts: it consists in adhering to a system of interpretation that is impervious to empirical data, or is so nebulous that any and every fact can be used to confirm it."
The ruts Trotsky's mind ran in seemed to have had a great deal in common with the similar circular logic of people who are committed to biblical inerrancy. I can very clearly see the Soviet Union as an utterly misbegotten attempt at Utopianism undertaken by the atheistic analogue to committed fanatic Christians.
Now that was a long read:
"In the early thirties Trotsky also spoke of ‘Bonapartism’ in the Stalinist regime. In 1935, however, he observed that in the French Revolution Thermidor had come first and Napoleon afterwards; the order should be the same in Russia, and, as there was already a Bonaparte, Thermidor must have come and gone. In an article entitled ‘The Workers’ State, Thermidor, and Bonapartism’ he amended his theory somewhat."
I expect it's Trotsky's blindness to his own similarities to Stalin and various reactionaries, plus his blind clinging to Lenin, that blinds him as well to the fact that Lenin was both his own Robespierre (given how he seized power, prosecuted the Civil War, and built his own murderous secret police) and his own Thermidorian reaction (NEP , the nationalities, etc.) and his own Directoire. Stalin was a decent analogue for Napoleon in the sense that he squeezed out the other members of Le Directoire in the end, but Trotsky was really the one for world conquest and constant expansion. (He certainly had the knack for it, given his butcherous but successful performance during the Civil War.) Stalin, monster that he was, was simply doing the heavy lifting of stabilizing the state, since constant revolution is not a viable path for a functioning or even barely functioning state.
"Trotsky, as a true doctrinaire, was insensitive to everything that was happening around him. Of course he followed events closely and commented on them, and did his best to obtain accurate information about the Soviet Union and world politics. But the essence of a doctrinaire is not that he does not read newspapers or collect facts: it consists in adhering to a system of interpretation that is impervious to empirical data, or is so nebulous that any and every fact can be used to confirm it."
The ruts Trotsky's mind ran in seemed to have had a great deal in common with the similar circular logic of people who are committed to biblical inerrancy. I can very clearly see the Soviet Union as an utterly misbegotten attempt at Utopianism undertaken by the atheistic analogue to committed fanatic Christians.
elm
hard to see anything good that came out of wwi